Noble Energy Real Estate Holdings wants to put a diesel-and-gasoline travel center and an 18,000-square-foot warehouse at 8261 Fienemann Road in Farmington, on 86 acres that drain toward Batterson Park Pond — a public pond on the New Britain line that the state has listed as impaired and is now spending roughly $10 million to restore. The land is owned by the City of Hartford's municipal pension fund and is under contract to Noble.
For five hearings, Farmington's Conservation and Inland Wetlands Commission has been trying to decide whether those two things can share a watershed. On June 3, in front of a packed room, it still couldn't — and it declined to try, holding the hearing open into a sixth night rather than take a vote. The fight has narrowed to a single number that two sets of experts cannot agree on, and the meeting became, in the end, a test of whose math the commission believes.
Along the way, the applicant has steadily shrunk the project. The warehouse came down from 28,000 square feet. The restaurant is gone. The parking is smaller, and the retaining wall along the wetlands edge has been pushed back. This time, the team came with three "jellyfish" stormwater filters — a stormwater redesign first floated at the last hearing — a wetlands mitigation plan, and a closing argument that the project is a net good for a watershed that is already in trouble. (For readers coming to this fresh: here is what Noble is actually proposing.)
Chair Statchen set a new target to finish, June 17, and moved on. The dispute that has stalled the hearing comes down to a single figure.
The number
The applicant's case, made across five hearings, is that this is the rare project that leaves a troubled watershed better than it found it. Of the 86-acre parcel, 75 acres would go into a conservation easement covering both on-site vernal pools and the core forest. The development itself, the team says, would cover about 5 percent of the parcel's footprint, tucked against existing roads. And the project would, for the first time, put treatment on the New Britain road runoff that currently pours into Batterson Pond untreated. "This is not just a gas station and a warehouse," the applicant's ecologist, Jackson Smith of William Kenny Associates, told the commission. "This is preservation of 75 acres of contiguous forest, high quality wetlands in a rapidly urbanizing town."
The watershed math is where that case is being tested. Taylor Capel, the project engineer with Solli Engineering, told the commission the development would remove less than 5 percent of the larger vernal pool's contributing watershed — a different 5 percent from the footprint figure, and closer to 3.5 percent measured by water volume. Smith put it as a ratio: the pool currently draws on about 20 acres of watershed for every acre of pool, and the project would shrink that to 19. "We don't find this to be a meaningful reduction in the pool's overall water budget," Smith said.
Stephanie Roman, the abutting property owner who has intervened in the hearing under Connecticut's environmental-protection statute, told the commission that figure measures the wrong thing. The piece of wetland the project actually threatens, she argued, sits on a slope and is fed not by surface runoff but by shallow groundwater moving sideways from the north — the exact ground the development would disturb. By her reading, the reduction to that distinct sub-watershed is not 5 percent. It is 56.8 percent. "It's not the 5 percent that they keep touting, or 3 percent I heard today," Roman said. The result, she told the commission, would be to "in essence, just dewater it."
The commission asked the applicant to come back with a single reconciled table — one set of impact and mitigation figures, the disagreement resolved on paper. One commissioner asked for something more specific: a before-and-after breakdown of how much of the watershed is already developed versus undeveloped, on the reasoning that losing undeveloped acreage costs the wetland more than losing ground that was already paved.
This is the whole hearing now. Not whether the project can be engineered — the engineering has been refined for five meetings — but whether the two sides are even describing the same patch of ground. It is, in its way, the same question the commission kept circling at its May 20 meeting: where, exactly, does the water go.
The filters
The other open question is whether the stormwater filters can do what a truck stop asks of them. Capel walked the commission through working Connecticut installations — a Cumberland Farms in East Granby, a Costco in Norwalk, a power plant in Bridgeport — and noted the units carry a general-use designation under Washington State's testing program, which Connecticut's stormwater manual recognizes.
Roman, who said she put the device's own specifications into the record, argued the filters are built for particulate-bound pollutants — the things that settle out — and that a fueling and trucking operation generates dissolved pollutants the cartridges don't catch: chloride, soluble phosphorus, dissolved metals, petroleum hydrocarbons. She also noted that the manufacturer's specification sheet lists 55 percent phosphorus removal, while the 75 percent figure cited elsewhere comes from the Washington study — not from anything tested in New England weather.
The exchange turned briefly sharp when a commissioner pressed Roman on whether she had a science background. She answered that she was quoting the state's 2024 stormwater manual, not her own expertise, and that her expert reports were already in the record. Statchen stepped in to keep the questioning on the project.
The turnout
What made June 3 different from the four hearings before it was the turnout. More than 20 people spoke in person, two more dialed in, and the commission's staff read a long list of written comments into the record — more than 40 in all, the overwhelming majority opposed.
The opposition came coordinated and credentialed. A joint statement signed by 11 state legislators from Hartford, Farmington, and New Britain — including Speaker of the House Matt Ritter, D-Hartford — was read into the record, urging that if the sale falls through, the three towns work with the state to fold the parcel into its open-space program. Two members of the New Britain Common Council submitted their own statement of opposition. State Representative David DeFronzo, D-New Britain, spoke in person, noting the site sits near two New Britain schools and that his grandparents bought a house on Slater Road in 1948.
The residents who followed did not speak in the language of watershed ratios. A mother from Alexander Road talked about having to tell her children they couldn't play outside. A 43-year resident said she did not want to wear a mask in her own yard. A man who said he had spent 27 years as an operating engineer told the commission that in his experience, contaminated ground never fully cleans up: "It can't be remediated. No matter what they say." An environmental scientist who said she once spent a year measuring an unremediated jet-fuel spill at JFK and Newark airports put the worry plainly — a spill in a wetland is not a thing you clean up, it is a thing you live with.
The point several of them kept returning to was one the applicant's own consultants had raised first: that the protection depends on the filters being installed, operated, and maintained correctly, for decades. The applicant's answer is that decades-long maintenance is exactly what the conditions of approval, the conservation easement, and the required annual reports to the town are for. To the speakers who returned to it, that was not reassurance. It was the problem stated out loud.
What the commission actually decided
For all the volume on Noble Energy, the commission spent the front half of its evening on the ordinary business it exists to handle, and it is worth noting it moved through that business in about an hour.
It accepted an application from a Wood Pond Road homeowner who wants to build a grass maintenance path down a steep slope to the shoreline of Woodridge Lake, and voted to walk the site before ruling on whether the work is significant. It accepted an application for a single-family house, pool, and pool house at 10 Main Gate — a parcel where the owner had withdrawn an earlier four-lot subdivision and consolidated everything into one lot — and set that one for a site walk too.
And it approved, with 19 conditions, the JBS Developers subdivision at 598 Plainville Avenue, a project that had come down from 20 houses to 18 over the course of its own hearings. The resolution is dated June 3, 2026.
Three real decisions, none of them contested. Then four hours, more or less, on the one that was.
What happens next
The commission set a deadline of June 10 for any additional information from the applicant or the intervenor, with the agenda to follow on June 12. Statchen said he wants to close the Noble Energy hearing on June 17 — though the applicant has a written extension and, by its own attorney's account, up to 65 more days available if the commission decides it needs them.
No vote on Noble Energy has been taken. The hearing is open. The number is still disputed.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. The Mercury covers slow civic processes that produce durable outcomes; Farmington Storage operates on the same principle, at institutional grade. What it keeps under those conditions outlasts the argument over it. 860.777.4001 📦
— Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's wetlands commission long enough to know that a four-hour hearing usually comes down to one number, and that the number is usually still in dispute when everyone goes home. He is on his third coffee. The hearing is continued. So, in a sense, is the coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering — the wetlands hearing that ran past everyone's bedtime, the resolution with 19 conditions buried in it, the watershed math that decides whether a truck stop gets built next to a pond the state is spending millions to fix. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we mean it: by the time you read this, the dust has settled, the figures are checked, and Jack Beckett has had at least two cups of coffee. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰